The most significant white woman portrayed in Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness would be Kurtz's fiancee (his "intended"). When Marlow
sees her almost a year after Kurtz's death, she is still mourning as if he had died yesterday or
even that day: her sorrow has not abated at all. However, she is a part of the "civilized" world
and knows nothing about what Kurtz had become while in the jungles of the
Congo.
She asks Marlow questions, and he works hard to say what she
wants or even needs to hear—without revealing the ugly truth, though it might be safe to infer
that this woman so idolized Kurtz that she might never have believed anything but the highest
praise of him.
"You
knew him well," she murmured..."Intimacy grows quickly out there,"
I said. "I knew him as well as it is possible for one man to know
another.""And you admired him," she said. "It was impossible to
know him and not to admire him. Was
it?"
Marlow treads carefully as he
speaks to her. Her admiration and devotion to Kurtz is obvious. She mistakes Marlow for Kurtz's
friend, and turns almost with desperation to Marlow to tell him of her worthiness of the man she
believed she knew better than anyone else. She pours out her pain to Marlow for she has no one
else to tell: no one who knew Kurtz. She is sure that everyone admired
him.
He drew men
towards him by what was best in
them.
Ironically, without knowing how
truly she speaks, Kurtz's fiancee
notes:
He died as he
lived.
Marlow begins to get angry
inside, and his rebuttal reflects what he knows of Kurtz that
she will never—must never—know:
"His end," I said, with dull anger stirring in me, "was in
every way worthy of his life."
Kurtz's
fiancee needs some kind of ease for the loss of the love of this man she knew, seemingly not at
all—or at least not as he had become in the Congo—so Marlow lies in an effort to give her some
peace:
"The last word
he pronounced was—your name."
She is
greatly comforted, though Marlow expects to be struck down by heaven for such a blatant lie,
especially when Kurtz's last words were nothing so dear as his intended's name—they were
actually, "The horror! The horror!" It seems there was no place in his mind for Kurtz to remember
her at the end for it would seem he had lost even himself.
This
woman has no true knowledge of what Kurtz had become. In a sense, she is symbolic of Europe. The
women with their lovely fans and pianos that created music of such beauty, were also immersed in
the oblivion that surrounded the circumstances of retrieving ivory so that it could be turned
into a "cool" profit, while being cherished and enjoyed.
For Marlow,
even recalling his horror, he could find no way to share the truth with the
grieving woman. She would go on in ignorance, just as Europe did—until word of the atrocities in
the Congo began to spread. Until then, the fiancee represents society's peace and
complacency—found only in ignorance.
No comments:
Post a Comment